Archive of WBAI radio shows
Going through old tapes of stories, essays and other musings on WBAI—done over 25 years—I’ve found some tapes that I thought were worth hearing again.
I’ve slowly (its expensive) been converting the old cassettes to CD’s, and then loading them up here as MP3’s. Some of them, obviously, will be a bit dated, but the core stories, events and subjects are, do, I think, have lasting value.
The quality of the shows is hit and miss because the cassettes of the shows were recorded not in the studio but on someone’s home equipment. More shows will be added as I continue the process…
I hope you get something worthwhile from these shows, and if you do, let me know—And and please let other people know as well.
Thanks,
Mike
Coming Home
My first show back on WBAI in the summer of 2009, after being gone from the station for five-and-a-half years…
The great yearning to return home after a long, long journey, and the discovery, made over and over by most people throughout history, that home is really a place in the mind—not something that stays fixed in space and time.
The Fishing Trip
August 1968… I venture out of my clean, safe, little Queens New York City neighborhood to visit my eternally absent father (AKA Ernest Hemingway), who’s building a chemical plant in the swamps of Southern Louisiana… Into the bayous we go on fishing trip. Mostly nibbles and no fish, but by the end of the visit, I land a big one.
The Probation Department—A Weed Grows in Brooklyn
Officer Mike is given a badge and vested by The City of New York with the authority to deal with bad guys. My adventures, (and misadventures) in Brooklyn family court, where I am assigned a nearly impossible case. Justice prevails, but not the way I had hoped or imagined it would.
Dead Storage—The Old Book Business.
Old books and letters are time capsules… Just holding one, let alone opening it and reading it, takes you on a journey to the past.
A modern-day Bartelby rummages through lives stored in boxes and discovers one of the essential values of memory.
Hurricane Gloria, The Big Blow of 1985
Our reporter, caught in the middle of a great storm, recounts his hair-raising (and perhaps hair-losing) story of survival. New York is besieged by the wrath of disturbed elements—This is when we find out who’s a man and who’s a mouse (and where you can buy cheese if you need it).
9/21/01—The World Trade Center Attacks
The first show back on WBAI’s airwaves after the planes hit the World Trade Center. The station’s Wall Street studios and offices, being only a few blocks from the scene, were enveloped in the great cloud of horror from the attacks… Reactions to the shock, terror and sadness of it all.
Jack—The Death of a Decent Man
As most religions have it, we all die (and, perhaps, continue to exist in another place or form) in the way that we lived. Instant (not to mention long range) Karma is gonna get you. A story about dying, death, and grieving.
Y2K Disaster—The Great Disappointment.
Musings on various prophecies about The End of days—this particular one concerning the predictions (complete with publication of various survival books) that the whole modern world as we knew it would completely cease to function on the stroke of midnight of the year 2,000. Why? Because all the computers in the world (and every service and machine that depended on them) had been programmed without planning for new millennium.
Did the whole world blow up? Stay tuned for the exciting ending.